Thursday, 22 August 2013

The first time I played Mafia II I had the flu and I played it in one day
because I was stuck in bed with nothing else to do. I thought it was
okay. I thought the city was lifeless and the story was contrived,
and too much of the game was functional rather than emotional. But I
also liked the violence. I liked how depressing it all was. I liked
the bit when you went to prison.

I'm
playing it again now and I like it a lot more. I'm not whether it was because
I was too young to care or too sloshed on tablets to notice but I didn't
really pick up on Mafia II the first time round. This second go
through has shown me a lot more. Despite some flaws, Mafia II is a
hell of a game. Here are some initial thoughts.

1. I
love the mundanity. I know the intention is pretty obvious, and
that Mafia II isn't the first thing to try and demystify gangster life, but
I think it's incredibly brave. This game came out two years after
Grand Theft Auto IV. It shared shelf space with Saints Row 2. In a
climate of fun-first sandbox games, Mafia II had players driving home
and going to bed after every mission. It had them visiting diners,
answering phone calls from their mother, drinking coffee in their
kitchen.

Honestly,
it's kind of boring. And I love that. I love how Mafia II doesn't
abbreviate, how it makes you stick with your shitty, idiotic, violent
character every step of the way.

When Vito goes out
at night and shoots six cops, then wakes up next morning, throws on a
jacket and eats his breakfast, it makes him seem all the more malevolent. It's
like he doesn't care. It's like that scene in Goodfellas where, after
Jimmy has had Maurie killed, he's at diner with Henry. “What about
Maurie's wife?” Henry asks. “Fuck her,” replies Jimmy. These
guys don't just do terrible shit, they don't care about doing it
either. Those workaday moments in Mafia II are a perfect contrast.
They show how easily Vito shrugs off the things he does; to put it in
mob parlance, they show how he's able to just fahged abarht it. His
lack of conscience is scary.

2. The
characters are all racist, stupid assholes. One of the first missions
has you boosting a car from a poor, black neighbourhood. Vito and his
scumbag friend Joe spend the whole drive over talking shit about
black people. “These people breed like rabbits...they're only
interested in shooting dope and killing each other,” that kind of
crap. It's disgusting. The character you play in Mafia II is
disgusting. And so, so dumb. He botches a simple robbery and gets
sent to jail. When Joe is reciting his crummy pick-up lines, Vito's
responses are all “heh, you need help buddy” and witless shit
like that.

And
he's got no honour, like, at all. One of the early missions sees Vito
trying to fake an honest living hoisting boxes at the docks. It pays
ten bucks per day and he spends the whole time bitching about how
tough it is.

Eventually, he gives up and walks off, and tells the
foreman that he don't need this slave labour. Once the bosses at the
dock find out he's friends with the mob however, they ask Vito to
help extort money from the dockworkers, and he agrees. He agrees! Ten
minutes earlier, this guy was working alongside the stevedores,
feeling first hand just how crummy it is to work hard and get paid
nothing. Now he's beating them up and stealing from them. He'll do
whatever, as long as there's easy money in it. Vito's dad was a
dockworker. He never had any money because of guys like Vito. But
Vito doesn't care. He's getting paid and that's what matters.

Later,
when his house burns down and his possession are destroyed, he tells
Joe that material things are all that matters to him. He's a fucking
degenerate. For all the Cosa Nostra bullshit about old countries and
omerta and honour, Vito's a guy who'll do anything for a dollar.

Some
other quick pointers.

3. The
game is beautiful. Not enough games are set in autumn/winter/the
fifties.

4. Mafia
II is the only game I know to get walking speed right. It's not a drag to walk from place to place and if you're playing the game
for the first time, I encourage you to go on foot as much as
possible.

5. The sister character is indefensibly shit. Weak, unquestioning, terribly
acted - she has nothing to do except be saved by Vito. I wish she'd
flip at him or turn him away or something. But no. She's just this
little vole of a person with no agency. Same goes for most of the
women. Yeah, the mob is a man's world, but since when was this game
on the Mafia's side?

6. The
scene where Vito arrives home from the war is fantastic. Let it Snow
is playing non-diegetically, and it's all kind of pretty, but if you
look close, his neighbourhood is a shithole. Some people are lying in
the street, others are yelling at each other and fighting. He's glad
to be home and, compared to the European Theatre, this place is picturesque. But we know straight away it won't last. Eventually the song will
stop and all Vito will be left with is this shitty neighbourhood.
Obviously he's going to want out.

Anyway,
that's Mafia II for me so far. I'm also linking to my interview with Daniel Vávra
who wrote both Mafia games. We talk mainly about the first one and I wrote it a while ago so it's shit of
course, but anyway, it's there if you want it.

Friday, 16 August 2013

Note: Please do click on the screenshots here to zoom in on them. They detail really has to be appreciated. I'm
standing outside the front door. This isn't my house, but it looks
like it. The door is locked. The key is hidden under a lawn ornament.
I go inside. Bathroom, kitchen, that crawlspace behind the stairs
that dad keeps bags of cement in. They're all here. This is a real
place and I've been here before.

And
for how many games can you say that? Gone Home is an exception.
Independent games, like Braid, Journey and Limbo have all dabbled, or
claimed to dabble, in the personal. They're emblematic of something
the creators reallyfeel, not
at all like that heartless triple-A garbage. They're real, man;
they're important.

Except
Gone Home actually is. Braid and the rest may attempt to extol some
personal philosophy on behalf of their authors, but they're all mired
in fantasy, set in colourful non-worlds and sprinkled in magic. In
Braid you can stop time; in Journey you can fly; in Limbo, you're in
Limbo. These are not really real, really – they're daydreams. They
might attempt to process real emotions through abstract or playful
illustrations, but compared to Gone Home, that's shite. Gone Home is
to those other indies what Studs Turkel is to Max Brooks. It's
better; it's a more potent truth.

It's
set in the mid-nineties and you play Kaitlin, a twenty-something
high-school grad who has just returned home to Portland after a year
away in Europe. Arriving back at your (big) house, you find mom, dad
and your sister Sam missing. The place is empty and no-one's left a
note on the fridge. Where is your family?

To
find out, you need to rifle through their drawers, their bookcases
and their diaries. You need to look beneath their lawn ornaments. In
the process, you uncover armfuls of 90s artefacts, from VHS tapes of
X-Files episodes recorded straight off the TV, to music magazines,
compilation tapes and self-help books. Some people will accuse Gone
Home of deliberately playing on nostalgia. As a matter of fact, it's
well observed. It's a wonderful, nuanced period piece, lovingly
placed together by a design team who lived back then. I lived back
then, too, and I can tell you, this is real. This is what my house
and my bedroom looked like. There's a bit where you find a “zine”
your sister has pasted together. I made zines too. My mum had old
X-Files episodes on tape.

This
is the other thing about Gone Home which is so precious. If I wanted
to teach my kids a thing or two about the nineties, I could play the
Smells Like Teen Spirit video, or give them a NES or put on My Own
Private Idaho. Or I could give them Gone Home, and let them walk
around and see it for themselves. This is a non-fiction game, a
non-fiction game that isn't some poxy CD-ROM sellotaped to the front
of an encyclopaedia. There's real life in here. I wrote before how
The Last of Us represented a new genre for videogames – character
drama. Gone Home is a step further. It's a heartfelt and honest
family story that doesn't need guns or zombies to hook you in. To
lure in dim players, there's some tertiary bumf about the house being
haunted, but it's ignorable. This is the story of the Greenbriars, a
nuclear family living in mid-nineties America, and it's real true.

Though
perhaps I've been suckered in. Maybe I'm just falling for the
aesthetic, the well-written gay characters (finally) and the fact
that Gone Home is just so different.
Maybe I'm easily pleased, so here are some criticisms.

First,
the voice-over. Your sister, Sam, narrates chunks of her journal to
you as you explore various regions of the house. It's fine -
well-written and well-played - but contrary to Gone Home's ostensible
intent. This is a game about discovery and domestic realism. You
should be finding these things out organically, by picking up items
or reading notepads. Sam's voice-over is an artificial intrusion on
this otherwise real world.

Second,
the house isn't quite right.
There are several narrative contrivances to explain things away. The
house is old, it was inherited from a rich and eccentric uncle and
the lights go out a lot because the wiring is shot. But Gone Home
suffers from that Deus Ex thing whereby everyone has left their
password on a post-it note by their computer. Compromising documents
about the family's personal lives are strewn all over the place; for
some reason, a ticket to an Earth, Wind and Fire concert was tucked
in a floor vent in the kitchen hallway.

Again, like the voice-over,
these discrepancies kill the buzz. So much of Gone Home is pitched
perfectly, hand drawn from the memory of a very astute design team.
It's a shame that honesty is mired with gameplay conceits.

And
I guess that affects what I was so excited about in the first place;
perhaps Gone Home isn't a totally real depiction of 90s living but,
like Call of Duty is to war, a condensed, hyper-real representation.
Maybe it's too stagey to be called a documentary. Maybe, rather than
the social analysis I want it to be, it's just as contrived and
made-up as any other “personal” videogame.

Maybe,
but that doesn't erase all the good things about Gone Home. I'll save
discussions of the narrative for another post (the dad's revived
writing career made me tear up) but there are so many moments, so
many drips of micro-story that I can't help but love Gone Home. It's
not just the things you find, it's the order you find them in. I
found dad's JFK biographies well before I found his pulpy conspiracy
novel tucked in the library. The pictures of Jodie Foster and Neve
Campbell on Sam's locker make sense only when you know who Lonnie is.
It's amazing to think that all these minute, disparate elements can
be arranged into a consistent narrative, especially when the player
is running around at random, looking at whatever. Perhaps that's why
documents and artefacts are plastered everywhere. It's the only way
to ensure wayward players will pick up on what's going on in the
Greenbriar home.

And
this is where games are now. Only last week, I was complaining about
Saints Row, GTA and Braid. I was saying that games, despite their
advancing years, had failed to mature in any significant way. I was
saying that I'd be embarrassed to show a videogame to my parents, and
that there was no way I could possibly vindicate a game as being
educational. Now I've played Gone Home, and I'm starting to wonder if
things could change. The most precious moment for me was when I went
into Sam's room and flicked through her collection of SNES
cartridges. Space shooters, cartoony platformers, beat 'em ups –
these were the games people were playing in 1995. Now, less than 20
years later, we have Gone Home. Game-makers are able to create
subtle, nuanced family drama based on their own experiences, and ship
it independently to a potential audience of millions.

Nostalgia
is nice and cosy and Gone Home works it perfectly, but at the same
time as it celebrates the past, it's a manifesto for the future.
Games are better now. They can teach us things beyond how to do
Chun-Li's helicopter kick. Verily, I loved Gone Home. I can't wait to
show it to my family.